Camera phones are not cameras
Fooled by marketing – again
A lot of people believe that their camera phone is actually a camera. They assume that a mobile phone with 3.2 megapixels and a Carl Zeiss lens is a great camera.
Film based cameras compared to digital cameras
I think it is fair to compare an analogue and a digital Single-Lens Reflex (SLR) camera. I also think it is fair to compare an analogue and a digital compact camera. But very few (if any) camera phones hold any comparison to any of the above. Camera phones can at best be compared to the cheapest and crappiest digital compact cameras.
If we continue the comparison of modern cameras to analogue cameras, I would say that todays camera phones compare in image quality to analogue disposable cameras. Even though camera phones like Nokia N73 and Sony Ericsson K800i have specifications that look great on paper, the images you can take with them do not look great on paper.
How can so many people be fooled so easily?
I believe most people with camera phones are a little like digital compact camera users: The pictures are mostly viewed on cellphones or relatively small home computer screens and they are rarely printed in large scales. The users never inspect the images in Photoshop or any other image processing program (have you seen the quality of the blue channel of a camera phone image?).
So all in all, people are happy with crappy images – until the day they take a picture that they really like and wish they could have made a big nice print out of it…
